Profile Information

Full Name:

Martin Woods

Display Name:

martinwoods

Job Title:

Head of Technical and Insight

Company:

WMG

Type of Work:

Agency

Location:

LEEDS

Favorite Thing About SEO:

No two jobs are the same

Bio:

I manage a team UK based SEO consultants, link builders, designers, programmers and software developers. I do enterprise SEO strategy and process. I specialise in Google penalty (manual action & algorithmic) removals and enjoy the cleaning up the web one bit at a time.

Blog Bio:

My personal blog contains a few things that I have written over the years mainly about SEO.

I've been specialising in Magento SEO for several years now and their is certainly a lack of good information about how to optimise it for search engines. You've got some great tips in this article to how to setup Magento (which is far from finished IMHO) from an SEO POV.

I would however offer a word of warning to anyone reading this about the dangers of layered navigation (also known asfaceted navigation).

"Side Note: If you've got a category that's got lots of filters on it, make sure that Is Anchor is set to Yes in Display settings. This will ensure that layered navigation is enabled."

If site is configured to use layered navigation you can potentially create huge problems with Google Panda, specifically with 'thin' or 'duplicate page issues. Specifically affecting your primary categories (and importantly primary keywords). Unfortunately like many SEO consultants I have found this out the hard way picking up projects which have migrated from other platforms to Magento with little thought as to the Migration.

The agency I worked at a while ago wrote a plugin to address this, but they have pulled support for newer versions. However there are several good alternatives to help resolve this issue of layered navigation by allowing you which pages to index,follow and more importantly which to not.

Thanks for the confirmation it works Nick. Usually I go down the cleaning domain route as I said, but this way has work for 3 / 4 dozen projects I have worked over the years. My first couple of domain flips didn't work, but I quickly learned from my mistakes, as you do. It's nice to start a fresh some times

Yeah, after experiencing a penalty follow to a new domain I would rather over egg it slightly than go through it all again. Lesson learn't the hard way in the early days.

I think you're probably about right with the 98.5% of webmasters not wanting to go down this route, thanks for clarifying how last resort this is for readers. It really is as you have said, when there is nothing left to redeem, and there were no good links in the first place.

Interestingly I did this new domain tactic, and the removal / disavow strategy with the same client on different geo-targeted domains. Each domain warranted a different approach, but both got results.

A little extra tip for anyone doing this. Watch out for intermediate links in your GWMTs link data, this is a very good sign of your domain flip not quite being perfect as Google notices the connection.

Great post Cyrus, you've covered some excellent points which if we're all honest we all might have forgotten the odd one or two!

You have a very interesting point about Google penalties following you round the internet. As you say Google are very clever at finding signals to make the connection between the sites. These are my tips which hopefully might help someone #TAGFEE!

From the work I have been doing for the past couple of years specializing in (mainly Google) algorithmic and manual actions, it is possible to move a site onto a new domain to escape a penalty, if that is your only (last)option I might add. I personally would always recommend cleaning up a domain as the first option, but in reality sometimes it's just not possible due to the amount of spam/ resource.

How to move a website to a new domain to escape a Google link penalty

You need to remove as many signals as possible between the new and old domain. These are some of the signals to block when doing this unfortunately sometimes necessary activity;

New Registrar

New Hosting Company (If possible)

New IP address (preferably on a new IP range, but a new C Block works)

New Google Analytics Account

New Google Webmaster Tools Account (can be the same as your new GA account)

New Adwords Account (I have seen no evidence of this being using to pass a penalty, but if you can great)

New Content for the homepage and top level pages (ideally more than this, but it's hard with very large websites.

Do not link AT ALL from the old domain to the new (this includes)

Physical ahref links on page,

Text copy with the new domain URL on it, but without a ahref link

Server side redirects (think 301's 302's ....)

Images with links

Remove all pages on the old domain. (I recommend redirecting all pages using a 302 to the homepage, or new page of the domain (domain.com/we-have-moved-url) This is just to inform any users coming to old cached pages, or via old links. I like to add a notification to visitors to update their bookmarks and links too.

I'm sure that there are many others identifiers which Google use as you say Cyrus, they have ALOT of data about sites, far more than we can even imagine I bet, but these are the ones which I have found to if done work.

Informing customers and visitors

The only safe way to inform visitors of your new URL I have found it to include the URL of the new website in image format without a link. Obviously this isn't great for usability, so this should be backed up with a marketing campaign helping to inform your customer base of the move.

I hope this helps someone else out who is struggling with a Google penalty!

It's something which some people find really hard to deal with isn't it? It must be really hard to be told that you basically don't offer any value to the internet...

Having said that, I'm sure that you and others reading this will have had some come back to you embracing this harsh/blunt truth with;

"OK, so tell me tell me what I need to do then, and we'll do it right this time. I'm listening..."

Those are the clients everyone should be wanting to work with post Google headache. If you're in the fortunate position to choose with whom you work with, those are the type of clients I enjoy working with. They've learn't the hard way and they're most focused on the long term rather than stupid meaningless KPIs and 'quick wins'.

Based on a fairly large sample size of cases I've seen over that past few years, it varies significantly as you have pointed out. I think it all comes down to 'do you deserve to rank?' once the weight of a manual action, or algorithmic issue have been fixed. When you pull away the rubbish, what is left?

Only last night I was talking to an old client (now good friend) whom had received one of the earliest link penalties handed out (pre Penguin). Luckily because he was one of the first, (if not the first) in his vertical to receive it, he's now doing really well, while the competition are still flailing around in no-where land. However the site took a while to 'come back', in terms of both traffic & rankings. In fact it's now up around +80% traffic compared to before the manual action was given. And more importantly conversions have more than doubled, illustrating that the spam links was just holding him down more than anything.

The after life

The strategy behind this campaign though was just to remove/disavow links and ask for a 2nd chance. At the start of the campaign we decided to do pretty much everything else as well;

New technically superior site

Huge content audit

Integrated content marketing campaign

New branding & quality guidelines

So pretty much the lot... and not just worry about links!

I've usually found that it usually only takes one refresh of Penguin to get things moving in the right direction again, if you haven't seen anything after that then I would strongly recommend exploring other options such as Panda issues, or over optimization. You wouldn't believe the number of SEO campaigns which come to us who have the worst type of over optimization in my opinion; keyword stuffing!

At WMG we have been meticulously recording every case we've worked on, and due to the high volume of removal projects we're working on we're seeing some very interesting data, which all being well I'll be able to share with everyone soon.

I personally think the key to seeing results after your Penguin/manual issue is to not just start planning it while you still have the problem, but to action things which will ensure that you deserve the right to rank and get the traffic you deserve.

A good article to forward on to new penalty/link removal clients John!

I agree, the personal aspect of link removal is certainly important, but the reality is that there does need to be some level of automation in the link removal process, or it's not in most cases a viable activity. One element of the process which had a huge impact on the conversion/success rate on projects that I've run in the past (apart from the quality of the research data) is the tone of the outreach, so as well as making sure emails don't damage the brand, do some A/B testing with the templates.

Link removal is getting harder and easierat the same time. Harder in the sense that the webmasters have become immune to emails, but easier in the sense now that more people are aware of the problem, and alot want to help you - when you get through to someone who can help you that is!

There are also other benefits of using link removal softwarein the process to make sure you don't get it wrong. Webmasters who I've spoken to in the past get LOTS of these requests every day and many would like to action them, but it was becoming just not viable to respond to all those link removal requests manually. Many now automate link removal requests using an API, which is especially handy when you're dealing with lots of article, comment, or directory spam. There is even a link removal request plugin for Wordpress for all those bloggers out there who have a problem with them.

This is an excellent topic John, the danger in the link removal process is seldom considered. I would always recommend using someone with a proven track record of getting the job done, but not damaging the brand in the process. Look at the Interflora fiasco when they (or the SEO agency working for them) did some pretty bad outreach to remove the links they had bought not so long ago. I personally believe that this is exactly the PR that Google wanted around buying and selling links, but that is another issue entirely...

A couple of tips that I've picked up over the years

#1 - Forget the email and pick up the phone! This is a great way to manage the reputation of the brand you're doing the removal work for and it will give you the edge over all those other people emailing endlessly to spam boxes.

#2 - Always always check your referral traffic and make sure that those 'bad links' which you (or some inaccurate automated software) have flagged as spam links to remove aren't making you revenue.

#3 - Add a phone number to outreach emails, let them speak to a real person and vent their anger at being asked to remove yet another link on their precious website. After all that you never know it could lead to a new friendship, or even business!